He was shaking his head violently, and his body trembled. “No, no, no,” he said. ‘‘It wasn’t me. I swear it wasn’t.”
“Think back, Jim. Try to remember that night.”
“I don’t remember,” he said in a gust.
“You do remember,” I said. “You have to, Jim.”
His body buckled and then he started to scream. The guard ran up behind and restrained him, looking at me with amazement. As quickly as he had started, Jim stopped and slumped forward. Tears and snot ran down his face. He lifted his face and looked at me with such hatred that I felt my face burn.
“You’re like everyone else,” he said. “You want me to say I killed him. To hell with you.” To the guard he said, “Get me out of here.”
“We have to talk,” I said.
“No more talking. You’re not my lawyer anymore.”
He jerked up out of the chair. The guard looked at me, seeking direction.
“Okay, Jim. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I won’t be here,” Jim Pears said.
A phone was ringing.
I opened my eyes and tumbled out of bed, hurrying to pick the phone up before it woke Larry.
“Hello,” I said, shaking from the chill.
A drunken male voice slurred my name.
“Yes, this is Henry. Who is this?”
“I know who killed Brian whatshisname,” the voice continued.
I sat down at the desk. “Who are you?”
“It’s not important,” he said. “It wasn’t that Pears kid. I’ll tell you that much.”
I was trying to clear my head and decide whether this was a crank call. I still wasn’t sure.
“Were you at the bar that night?” I asked.
“Not me. Shit, you wouldn’t catch me dead in the valley,” he said and chuckled.
“Then how do you know?”
“I saw you on the news,” he said. “You’re kinda cute, Henry. You gotta lover?”
“Tell me about Brian Fox.”
I heard bar noises in the background and then the line went dead.
I put the phone down. If it was a crank call, the caller had gone to a lot of trouble to find me. He would have had to call my office up north to get Larry’s phone number. Unless he already had it. Josh Mandel? As I tried to reconstruct the voice, the phone rang again. I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said, quickly.
“Mr. Rios?” It was a different voice, also male but not drunk.
“Yeah. Who am I talking to?”
“This is Deputy Isbel down at county jail,” he said. “We got a bad situation here with Jim Pears.”
“What happened?”
“Seems like he overdosed.”
I stared at my faint reflection in the black window. “Is he dead?” I watched myself ask.
“No,” the deputy replied cautiously. “They took him down to county hospital. Thought you’d want to know.”
“Did you call his parents?”
“His dad answered,” the deputy said, grimly. “Thanked me and hung up before I could tell him where the boy was.”
“I see,” I replied. “Where’s the hospital if I’m coming from Silver Lake?”
I scrawled the directions on the back of an envelope and hung up. In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, subdued my hair, rinsed my mouth, and dressed. I crept down the stairs. Just as I was closing the front door behind me, I heard the phone ring again. By the time I got to it, the caller had hung up.
11
Jim was still alive at daybreak. His doctor set her breakfast tray on the table in the hospital cafeteria where I had been waiting for her. She took a bite of scrambled eggs and made a face.
“They should make hospital cooks take the Hippocratic oath,” she said. “‘First, do no harm.’ That part.”
I smiled, not too convincingly to judge from her expression. Her face was the color of exhaustion. She turned her attention to her meal, and ate with complete concentration as if taking a test. When she lifted her head, she looked almost relieved to be done with it.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
I smiled again, this time genuinely. No matter how casually a doctor asked, this question always sounded like an accusation to me.
“I’m tired,” I replied.
She nodded understanding^. “Go home.”
“If he’s all right.”
Her narrow, studious face tensed a bit. “I didn’t say that.”
“No,” I agreed, “you didn’t.”
“He’s alive, Henry, but not all right.” She rubbed her eyes. “He was unconscious for a long time, not breathing well. There’s brain damage. How did he get those barbituates in jail?”
“They were prescribed,” I answered. “To relieve anxiety. He must have stockpiled them.”
“If they’d found him five minutes later, he’d be dead.”
“It seems that was his plan.” In my head I heard him telling me that he wouldn’t be at the jail when I returned to see him.
According to the guards who’d brought him into the hospital, one of Jim’s cellmates had been awakened by a gurgling noise. It was Jim, choking on his own vomit.
“You never said what he was in for,” the doctor said.
“Murder,” I replied.
“That little guy?”
“Yes,” I said. He had also told me that he had wanted to kill himself, not Brian. Well, maybe he killed part of himself when he killed Brian. He decided to finish the job. Thanks to me.
She curled her elegant fingers around a chipped coffee mug. “Well, he did manage to do a lot of damage to himself, so I guess murder’s not impossible.”
“Will he live?”
“Parts of him.” She wore a thin gold wedding band. She saw me notice it and said, “You were one of the lawyers on that sodomy case a couple of years back.”
“I’m surprised you remember.”
“I recognized your name as soon as you told me. You’re his lawyer, or what?”
“His lawyer,” I said, shaking the grounds at the bottom of my coffee cup.
“No parents?”
“He has parents,” I said, setting the cup down. “They couldn’t be bothered.”
“That’s rough,” she said, blinking the tiredness from her eyes. She studied me. “Was his situation so bad?”
I nodded. “He got backed into a corner. I helped put him there.”
“Working in emergency,” she said, “I see a lot of suicide attempts. The ones who survive, they didn’t mean to succeed.” She pushed her tray away. “The ones who don’t make it — it’s not that they give up, Henry. They fight, but they fight to die. That’s what Jim’s doing. You can murder someone, but you can’t make him kill himself. You understand?”
I studied the pattern of the grounds at the bottom of my cup. “Yes,” I said, lifting my tired eyes to hers.
“Go home,” she said. “I’ll call you if anything happens.”
It was cold and gray outside the hospital. The sun was like a circle of ice, lightening the sky around it. The silvery towers of downtown shimmered through the morning mist. In this weather the palm trees seemed wildly incongruous, like tattered banners of summer.
I had read, years ago, of the Japanese poet who commented upon suicide, “A silent death is an endless word.” Should I read Jim’s attempt to kill himself as a reproach, as release, as an admission of guilt? Of love? I could understand why he did it but I didn’t approve. It was the drama that disturbed me. The most basic rule of survival is to wait things out. It was a rule Jim was too young to have learned. With almost twenty years on him, I knew that the great passions — love, fear, hope, terror — merge with the clutter of the day-to-day, and become part of it. A truer symbol of justice than the blindfolded goddess was a clock.
A clock was ticking in the kitchen of Larry’s house as I let myself in. He was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked up when I entered.
“I heard your car when you left,” he said. ‘‘That was six hours ago.”
“You’ve been awake since?”
“Off and on,” he replied. “It’s Jim, isn’t it?”
“He tried to kill himself,” I said, sitting down.